Sequencing of the 45kb fragment of the HLA class III region from six individuals was completed by the Sanger Center over this past fiscal year, where mini-libraries were created from each PCR fragment and multiple clones were sequenced to create contigs. Further sequencing of short stretches that were not resolved by the Sanger Center are being completed in my laboratory. Meanwhile, Beena Neelam from Dr. Bob Stephens group has begun to assemble the contigs of genomic sequences from individual clone sequences provided by the Sanger Center and we are in the process of preliminary analysis of the data available so far to see if there is a correlation with the rate of recombination.KIR and HLA typing have been completed over this past year on the 30 geographically distinct populations, and in collaboration with Dr. Rich Single at the University of Vermont, we have begun to analyze the data.